The name Bernhard Karlgren (Gao Benhan) is well-known to all Chinese who take an interest in the history of their own language. I shall here dwell on Bernhard Karlgren, the man behind the scholar.
I first met Bernhard Karlgren in the spring of 1946. At that time I was studying Latin and Greek at the University of Uppsala, about eighty kilometres north of Stockholm. While I was working hard to prepare for an exam in Latin, I happened to come across a book by the famous scholar Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (Shenghuo de yishu. In that highly readable work the author discusses some of the greatest of Chinese Daoist thinkers, such as Zhuang Zi and the anonymous author of Dao De Jing, The Book of Dao and its Power. I was fascinated by that work and immediately went to the University Library to borrow all translations of it into languages which I could read. I soon found that the translations into German, English and French were so utterly different that I could not understand how they could be based on the same original. I summoned up courage and telephoned to Bernhard Karlgren, who was then the Head of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, and asked if I could pay him a visit. He invited me to visit him at the museum. When I met Bernhard Karlgren a few days later, I asked him which one of the three translations of the Dao De Jing was the most reliable one. He replied that they were equally poor. He told me that the only reliable translation of the work was his own, as yet unpublished. He lent me the manuscript which I read and returned to him a week later. On my second visit to Karlgren he asked me why I bothered to study Latin and Greek, and why I did not take up Chinese instead. When I told him that I would be happy to do so, he said: “Good! Come back in late August, and I shall teach you. Good bye!”
In August of 1946 I gave up my studies of Latin and Greek and moved to Stockholm. At that time it was quite impossible to find a place to stay there, and I therefore, for several weeks, had to sleep on benches in parks and squares, or in the railway station, if the weather was too bad to allow me to sleep out-of-doors. But that did not greatly matter: I was happy to be able to study under Bernhard Karlgren.
The strange thing is that Karlgren did not publish his translation of the Dao De Jing until 1975, three years before he died. He once told me that his teacher Chavannes, under whom he studied Chinese in Paris (1912-14), had told him to stay away from the Dao De Jing. “The time is not yet ripe to translate the Dao De Jing”, Chavannes had said. “When all major works of the pre-Qin period have been expertly translated, and that will require the joint effort of generations of Sinologists, only then would the time have come to translate the Dao De Jing, if at that time it still would be considered a genuine pre-Qin work.”
Karlgren’s translation of the Dao De Jing appeared two years after the publication of the magnificent finds at the Ma Wang dui, comprising two manuscript versions of the text. Karlgren, who was nearly blind at the time, could not possibly have read the reproductions of the manuscript texts, which were utterly poorly printed in an archaeological journal. But even though Karlgren did not consult the Ma Wang dui texts, his translation stands out as far superior to most other attempts at interpreting the Dao De Jing.
Let me go back in time, to Bernhard Karlgren’s childhood and youth. He was born in 1889, in a town in southern Sweden. His father was a high-school teacher of Latin, Greek and Swedish. There were seven children in the family. Although the family was very poor, all children received tertiary education. Bernhard Karlgren’s elder brother Anton became professor in Slavonic languages, and his younger brother, who became a professor in Law, ended his career as a High Court Judge.
The stern master of Latin and Greek insisted that his sons should learn to speak Latin. As a young schoolboy, Bernhard Karlgren translated Latin and Greek poetry and always insisted on achieving an absolute correspondence between the metrical structure of the original poem and his translation. Comparing his translations with those made by learned Latin and Greek scholars, I find the school-boy Bernhard Karlgren’s translations far superior. In his own poetry, the young Bernhard Karlgren used the metrical forms of Classical Latin and Greek poetry.
Bernhard Karlgren’s father worked himself to death in 1905, before it was time for him to retire. At the time, Bernhard was still at high-school. With only a meagre widow’s pension, Bernhard’s mother had to make ends meet, with a family of seven children. To do so, she had to take in school children as boarders. She occasionally earned some money translating English and French short stories into Swedish. She must have been a most remarkable woman, intelligent and capable, and with a great sense of humour. The letters which she wrote to Bernhard, and which are kept in the family archive, clearly show that she had a remarkable command of the Swedish language. A younger sister of Bernhard has compiled a catalogue of her mother’s favourite expressions and sometimes very drastic formulations. To provide food and drink for the large household cannot have been an easy task. Bernhard’s mother once complained that she was allowed to rest “only at the Never-never Festival, when they shear the pigs!” She reproved idleness in many drastic formulations: “It’s hard to part a lazy farm-hand from a warm bed!”
Circumstances had taught Bernhard’s mother to fear what she called ”black poverty”, when “the bread basket hangs high up under the ceiling!” She knew only too well that “poverty is a hard nut to crack!” “Of nothing you get nothing!” “Much water flows while the miller is asleep!” “You get as much time as you can spend!” One of her sayings is especially subtle: “Shame on him who does better than he can!” You have to stand on your own feet and trust to your own ability: “Wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which hand gives you the most!” One should be content and satisfied with one’s lot: “Whatever is put on the table is tasty!”; “You must not put your hunger on another’s plate.” “If need be you have to dance on wooden legs!” Bernhard’s mother certainly did not lack self-confidence: “My main weakness is that I do too well whatever I do!”
Bernhard was very attached to his mother and retained his love for her throughout his life. I am certain that his drastic humour and occasionally very sharp tongue were inherited from his mother.
Karlgren had absolute pitch which is not always a blessing. As a young schoolboy he was interested in phonetics and at the age of fourteen he investigated several dialects spoken in areas close to his home-town. These investigations were published in a highly prestigious academic journal.
Having graduated from high-school, he studied for two years at Uppsala University. In 1909 he took his B.A degree in Slavonic Languages, Nordic Languages and Greek. His professor in Slavonic Languages, Lundell, was a great pioneer also in the studies of Swedish dialects. Recognizing Bernhard Karlgren’s unique facility for dialectological research, he suggested that Karlgren should travel to China and study Chinese dialects. But before going there, he would have to learn some Chinese. In the winter of 1909, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg, where he studied Chinese for two months. In February of 1910, he boarded a Swedish freighter and sailed to Shanghai. During the voyage, which took nine weeks, he taught himself more Chinese by reading an excellent textbook, Mateer’s Mandarin Lessons.
Before leaving Sweden, Bernhard Karlgren had secured a teaching appointment at the Shanxi Da Xuetang, a university with an interesting background. The establishment of the Shanxi Da Xuetang was the positive result of a disastrous political development. The infamous treatment that the Western powers had visited on China in the 19th century had fomented among the masses an intense hostility toward foreigners, especially missionaries. It is estimated that in 1889, the year that Bernhard Karlgren was born, about 4,600 missionaries were active in the country. In 1898, Shandong province was struck by immense floods, which left over a million people homeless. Many victims were easily persuaded that these natural disasters had been caused by the obnoxious foreigners, who had affronted the gods with their false doctrines and disturbed the protective powers of Wind and Water with their railway construction and telephone poles. It was therefore certainly not a coincidence that xenophobia found such violent expression in the province of Shandong. The floods and the ensuing famine had created a panic among the population. Magical cults, which have characterized many secret societies in the long history of China, had flourished in Shandong since time immemorial. To the many secret societies operating in Shandong belonged the Yihequan, “The Righteous and Harmonious Fists”, whose members were termed “Boxers” in the West. The activities of the Boxers culminated in 1900, when they entered Peking and laid siege to the foreign legations there. When the boxers had been defeated by troops of allied Western powers, Li Hongzhang was appointed to conduct the negotiations with representatives of the foreign powers. The conditions of the peace treaty, concluded on September 7, 1901, were exceptionally harsh. China was forced to pay a war indemnity of 450 million ounces of silver, then equal to 67.5 million pounds. The peace treaty also amounted to an extremely serious violation of China’s sovereignty.
The missionary societies in Shanxi were entitled to indemnity for the great losses of life and property caused by the Boxer rebellion. The far-sighted Welsh Missionary and publicist Timothy Richard (1845-1919) succeeded to persuade the missionaries in Shanxi to renounce their right to indemnity. He thereafter approached the Manchu Court and Li Hongzhang, suggesting that the provincial government should spend a sum equal to the renounced indemnity in order to establish a Western university in the city of Taiwan. The provincial government agreed to earmark 500,000 ounces of silver over a period of ten years, during which the Shanxi Da Xuetang should be managed by Europeans. Timothy Richard hoped that the Chinese authorities would be responsible for the running of the university thereafter. The Shanxi Da Xuetang was established in 1902. In 1911, the 22 year old Bernhard Karlgren was appointed professor in English, German and French at the Da Xuetang, with a teaching load of 22 hours a week and a salary of 170 silver dollars a month, then an enormous sum of money.
Bernhard Karlgren must have been rather busy during the time he spent in Taiyuan 1910-11. In addition to a fairly heavy teaching load, he had to improve his knowledge of Chinese and also gather dialect material for his thesis. In a letter to his girlfriend, who later became his wife, written on February 9th of 1911, he writes: “My work has only just begun. Even if you know the modern colloquial and recognize a couple of thousand Chinese characters, you cannot read a single line of Chinese literature. The Chinese themselves have to learn it as a separate language, or rather 6 or 7 different languages, and spend 10 to 15 years doing so. Once you after no end of toil have mastered the language used in the classics, you still cannot read the histories written at the same time. If you master the two languages, you still cannot read a line of poetry. If you master the three languages, you still cannot read novels. If you master the four languages, you still cannot read newspapers. If you master the five languages, you still cannot read imperial edicts, trade agreements, passports, etc. And so on, and so on. So you can see that I still have a long way to go. (I forgot to mention the Buddhist canon).”
I have myself had the same experience as Bernhard Karlgren. Even if you have learnt the language of the Meng Zi, you find it hard to read the Zuozhuan. And even if you have learnt the language of the Zuozhuan, you still cannot read the Shujing.
During the summer of 1910 Bernhard worked hard on acquiring the Peking dialect and the local dialect of Taiyuan. With the aid of informants, he also gathered material on the dialects of Gansu, Shaanxi and Shanxi. In the winter of 1910, he made several adventurous trips to Xi’an and Kaifeng. During his stay in China, Bernhard Karlgren gathered material on 22 dialects, mainly in North China. With the aid of this material, and some traditional phonological works, he was able to reconstruct what he himself called Ancient Chinese (now called Middle Chinese), the national language spoken by educated Chinese at the end of the Sui and beginning of the Tang dynasty (around 600 A.D.
Karlgren’s stay in China was cut short by the outbreak of the Xinhai revolution. On October 29, 1911, the revolutionary troops, commanded by General Yan Xishan, conquered Taiyuan. Gao Benhan sent a very dramatic account of the fighting to his elder brother, who then served as editor of the leading Swedish daily newspaper. On November 22, 1911, Karlgren returned to Sweden, travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
After a short stay at London University at the beginning of 1912, Karlgren decided to move to Paris, where he studied under the famous professors Chavannes (Shawan) and Pelliot (Bai Xihe), two of the greatest Western sinologists of the time. Even though Paris was the foremost centre of Sinology at the time, conditions for research were very limited indeed. At that time there were no large dictionaries of the type Hanyu Da Cidian or the Japanese scholar Morohashis tremendous Dai Kanwa jiten (Da Han-He Cidian). There were no concordances to texts, no data bases, no interlibrary catalogues and not even facilities for copying (Xeroxing) texts. In one letter from Paris to his girlfriend, Bernhard Karlgren mentions that he in vain has looked for a copy of a certain Chinese text in the libraries in Paris. He writes that he may have to go to Leiden in Holland or to London, to look for the text there. Had he found the text, he would have to copy it by hand!
During his two years in Paris, Bernhard Karlgren completed his thesis, published in 1915, as the first part of his Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise. This work was translated by three of China’s greatest philologists (Zhao Yuen Ren, Li Fang Kuei and Luo Changpei) and published in 1940, under the title Zhongguo yinynxue yanjiu.
In 1915, Karlgren took his doctorate in Chinese at Uppsala University, where he remained teaching Chinese until 1918, when he was offered a personal Chair in East Asian languages at Gothenburg University. He rapidly taught himself Japanese and within a year started giving lectures in both colloquial and literary Japanese. His salary as professor was very meagre, and he therefore had to augment his income by touring the western part of Sweden as a lecturer. From January 1919 until June 1921 he gave no less than 160 lectures in Gothenburg and western Sweden, for which he received a total of 5,678 crowns. Before Karlgren left Uppsala, he had tried to earn some extra money through popular writing and translation. For one work, translated into English under the title Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1918), he received a mere 200 crowns. For a translation of a long novel by H.G. Wells, published in 1917, he received 145 crowns, which sum covered one month’s local taxes and milk for the family plus a box of headache tablets. Karlgren never earned one cent on his scholarly works, which were mainly published in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. It may seem strange to a Chinese audience that Bernhard Karlgren, who in his long career served as Vice-Chancellor of Gothenburg University and President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and Head of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, was utterly poor throughout his life. According to the estate inventory, drawn up after his death on October 20, 1978, his total assets amounted to 5,301 crowns (equal to as many HK dollars)!
A less well-known fact is that Bernhard Karlgren in the 1940s published a number of novels, under the pseudonym of Clas Gullman. (The main reason for this was that he needed money to support his son, who studied medicine at Uppsala University). The novels, which are always set in an academic milieu, were well received by the public.
I have already mentioned that Bernhard Karlgren, as a teenager, translated Latin and Greek poetry in a masterly way. It is indeed a great pity that he did not find the time to translate more of Chinese literature. He did, in fact, translate a great deal of pre-Qin works, such as the Shijing and the Shujing, but those translations aimed at philological correctness, rather than literary elegance. Apart from some excellent translations of excerpts from the works of the great philosophers and thinkers of the Chunqiu period, he translated only a few pieces by Tao Yuanming and Ouyang Xiu, and a collection of stories from the Jingu qiguan今古奇观。Had he translated works by the great Tang and Song poets, his keen ears and his feeling for prosodic subtleties would most certainly have made his translations stand out as masterpieces.
To Bernhard Karlgren, Modern China began in the Eastern Han period, and he took very little interest in works of a post-Han date. To him, pre-Qin China was a treasury of literature. The works which he loved the most were the Zhuang Zi and the Zuozhuan. The very first lecture by Bernhard Karlgren that I attended in August 1946 was devoted to the Zuozhuan, and that work kept his students busy for the whole of the first term. I personally thoroughly dislike text books. To me, the Zuozhuan was the best introduction to the Chinese language that I could hope for.
Karlgren never found the time to read much of modern Chinese literature. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin (Siwen Heding), who in 1913 had been elected a member of the Swedish Academy, was very anxious to find a Chinese candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a letter to Bernhard Karlgren, from December 1924, Hedin asked for his opinion about suitable candidates to the Nobel Prize. In his reply, which is dated December 20, 1924, Karlgren mentions the thorough social and political transformation that China had undergone in recent years. He writes as follows: “All these burning questions to an intellectual Chinese are mainly treated as contributions to a debate, bur rarely take the form of pure literature. As far as I can see, New China has not as yet produced any major writers, whether of prose or poetry. If, therefore, the best works of men like Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan and Hu Shi were translated into Western languages, they would be utterly unenjoyable, however important they may be to the Chinese. I therefore find it quite impossible at present to single out a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In order not too rashly dismiss an important task, I shall discuss the matter with a young Peking professor, without of course mentioning the Nobel Prize – one of the leaders of the movement for language reform and an intimate friend of mine, who presently studies linguistics in Paris. If he is able to point out someone who, according to he most eminent Chinese critics, is equal to the standing of leading writers in the West, or for example Tagore, I shall immediately seriously consider his works and later report my views to you.” The young professor to whom Karlgren refers in his letter must have been Liu Fu (Liu Bannong), with whom Karlgren corresponded at the time.
You must keep in mind that this letter was written a few years after the outbreak of the May 4th Movement 1919.
Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan and Hu Shi, whom Karlgren mentions in his letter to Sven Hedin, all played important, and at the same time widely differing roles in the process that transformed China into a modern society. Karlgren’s reply to Sven Hedin indicates that he had not had the opportunity to follow the growth of literature in the wake of the May Fourth Movement, and that he therefore had not read works by writers and poets such as Lu Xun, who in 1923 had published his Nahan, and Wen Yiduo, who in the same year had published his Hongzhu, a collection of exquisite poetry.
What Karlgren taught his students (and they were very few) was Classical Chinese texts and historical Chinese phonology. He explained to us in great detail how he had reconstructed Ancient Chinese of the 7th century A.D. and Archaic Chinese of the early Chunqiu period. It may seem strange to you, but the truth is that when I myself arrived in China in the summer of 1948, I could not speak a word of Chinese, but I knew the rime class of most characters which I was confronted with, and also to which rime category in the Shijing they belonged.
Explicating a text, Karlgren used whatever language that seemed to him to convey the meaning and the structure of the original in the best way: his paraphrases of a passage in the Zuozhuan could therefore contain words and structures which he borrowed from French, Latin, Greek, and sometimes English and German.
He never spoon-fed his students, and he never tested our knowledge. He always took for granted that we spent most of our time doing nothing but Chinese. And we did.
There were only six students in the class starting in August of 1946. Having followed his courses for one whole year, we once asked Karlgren if he could not give us a course in Chinese bibliography. He reluctantly agreed and compiled a list of some thirty Western scholars in the fields of Sinology and read it out to us: “Chavannes! He is good! Read Chavannes! Conrady! Yes, read his work on the Tianwen, “The Heavenly Questions!” “Dubs! Fine!” “Duyvendak! Excellent!” “Ferdinand Lessing! Read his work on the Lama Temple in Peking!” Pelliot! Don’t skip his footnotes!” “You’ll find the books in the Museum Library!” That was it!
Five of the students following Karlgren’s courses in 1946-48 held Rockefeller Fellowships, according to the rules of which they should spend one year doing field-work in China and one year at the University of California at Berkeley, studying under Karlgren’s friend Zhao Yuan Ren. The fee that Karlgren received from the Rockefeller Foundation he did not keep for himself: he sent the whole sum to a book-dealer in Hong Kong, asking him to send a collection of the best works in modern Chinese literature to the Museum Library. After my return to Sweden in 1950, I was asked to catalogue that collection and then found that it contained all major works, in prose and poetry, from the 1920’s and up to the early 1940’s.
In the cultural traditions of China, the relation between teacher and student is very special. I firmly believe that the relation between Bernhard Karlgren and his students also was very special, in the same way. While we students venerated and loved our Master, we never dared to show our affection for him. And Bernhard Karlgren wished us to believe that he was a cynical scholar who did not give damn about our private lives and problems. His task was to teach us Chinese, and that was it. But whenever he sensed that a student of his had problems, he was always ready to help, without seeming to do so. When I studied under Bernhard Karlgren in the late 1940’s, he must have realized that I was very poor. He then offered me a job as a library assistant in the Museum Library: two hours a day and a pay of 200 crowns a month, enough to pay for my rent and food.
Bernhard Karlgren’s personality was highly complex. While he himself was a leftish radical and anti-monarchist, he looked upon King Gustav VI Adolf as a good friend. (The king was a learned scholar and a great expert on Chinese antiquities, especially porcelain and jade). Brought up in a highly religious family, Karlgren was fiercely anti-clerical, anti-church and anti-missionary. He wanted to appear as an arrogant cynic, and yet, the misfortune of his fellow beings could move him to tears. Although a member of several academies and learned societies, he severely condemned academic snobbery. I well remember how I once visited Bernhard Karlgren in his study at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. I found on his bookshelves two copies of a Chinese bibliography that I had looked for a long time, in vain. I asked if he could let me have one of the copies, and he immediately handed me one of them, dedicated to him by the author. When I pointed this out to him, he said: “It does not matter! It is written in pencil and can be easily erased!” Bernhard Karlgren did not suffer from intellectual conceit, nor did he shut himself up in an ivory tower. That people who did not know him well considered him aloof was due to the fact that time was more valuable to him than to most others. He would not allow himself to be disturbed when he sat at his desk at the Museum, and he could be furious if for one reason or other he had to interrupt his research.
When the British intellectual giant Joseph Needham visited Sweden some time in the 1980s, I accompanied him to Bernhard Karlgren’s sickbed in a hospital close to Stockholm. During the conversation between the two aged scholars, Karlgren said: “I do believe that I have got a grip on the pre-Han literature of China.” Uttered by a scholar who had spent six decades on the study of the comprehensive literature of ancient China and who to a higher degree than anyone else had contributed to the solution of many philological problems related to it, this may seem a deliberate understatement. I personally believe that Karlgren meant what he said. The dialectological investigations, which had fascinated him in his youth, had come to serve as an instrument for his reconstruction of Ancient Chinese, which in turn served as a point of departure for his reconstruction of Archaic Chinese. The results of his research on historical phonology were transformed from goal to means – his reconstruction of Archaic Chinese made it possible for him to tackle problems of philology and textual criticism with tools that never had been used before.
Bernhard Karlgren’s last scholarly work, “Moot words on some Zhuang Zi chapters), published in 1976) ends with the words “To be continued”. When I visited him in hospital a few weeks before his death, I found on the table by his bed a notebook filled with large Chinese characters, which the hand of the 89 year old scholar could form, but which his weak eyes did not allow him to read. Bernhard Karlgren passed away on October 20, 1978. The funeral service took place on November 6 in the church on Skeppsholmen, quite close to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. His ashes were interred in the cemetery of the 12th century church, situated a few kilometres from the place by the seacoast, where Karlgren had spent many summers.
